Since arriving in
Byron Bay about 3 weeks ago, we’ve been involved in several different kinds of
ministry ranging from feeding the homeless to local volunteer work to street
and beach witnessing. The first two I mentioned are easy. You show up, you do
what is needed, love on people and share your faith when the window is there.
It’s all about blessing people. The latter, on the other hand is a little bit
different in Byron Bay. While people are generally polite and accepting, as
soon as you begin to talk about your faith, their guard seems to come up
instantly. Many will either listen and change the subject as quickly as
possible or proceed to tell us everything that is wrong with our “religion”. I
had one aussie guy straight up tell me that Christianity is bull **** and would
rather believe in dreamtime (the local aboriginal tradition) than to believe in
a guy that may or may not have existed 2,000 years ago. Another man, an
aborigine, told us that Christianity had ruined Australia and forced the
natives off of their land and from their way of life. Initially, I was quick to
blame much of this on the enemy’s influence over the people we’ve talked to,
but God began to show me that this wasn’t the only component at work here.
Much of this, I
believe, is our fault. By “our” I mean the body of Christ as a whole. In
various conversations that I’ve had, I have found that Christianity has been
misrepresented for so long in Byron (and around the world, actually) that many
just don’t really know who Jesus really is and the message we are trying to
communicate. According to many people I’ve talked to, Christians are
intolerant, unloving, hypocritical, forceful and generally, uneducated about
what they believe. This creates the idea that Christians are “brainwashed” to believe
what they believe without any real foundation to support it. Even worse, now
they’re out to brainwash everyone else!
Through the devil’s
influence on God’s own people, this bad seed that has been planted here over
generations has created an environment that is vastly closed to the gospel. The
intolerance of those have come before us have paved the way for a culture of
extreme tolerance. A culture that says “you believe what you want and I’ll
believe what I want and we’ll both eventually get to the same place”. It is
difficult to communicate the love of Christ which can be misconstrued as
tolerance for different beliefs and then balance that by saying that we have
all sinned and are in need of His forgiveness and grace.
My team and I have been going in to Acts quite a bit this month,
looking at how God was able to use the early apostles to begin a movement of
Christianity wherever they went. Seeing what God did through them at that time,
we would find ourselves asking what we’re doing wrong. Why isn’t God using me
in that way? Why aren’t miracles happening wherever we go and why aren’t our
numbers growing daily? Those are loaded questions, but I believe that part of
it is that the hearts of the people here are hardened toward God due to our
collective irresponsibility.
So what are we doing now? The basics of what Christ taught us –
loving people. To show people who He really is we have to reflect His character
before we do anything else. That’s been our main goal since we arrived in Byron,
to love people and let them see Jesus in us. Many groups and churches have
already been changing the culture; we’ve only been a small part. Youth With A
Mission has been a great partner of ours while we’ve been here and they have
done an amazing job consistently reaching out in the community as well as local
churches such as Eastgate Church where we’ve been staying.
God is moving here, just not as He did in Acts as we would like.
He has used us to speak life, love and encouragement to many people that we’ve
come to know here. We’ve had the opportunity to pour into locals, the homeless,
backpackers and those on holiday and it has been a joy and a privilege to interact
with them on a daily basis. Many people have told us that people know we’re
here. Our presence has been felt in the community and I haven’t personally
heard of any negative comments about us being here.
As I write this, my squad has been here for nearly 3 weeks and
will be here another week before we move on to the Philippines. Please pray
that our last week here will be fruitful, that God will grant us favor with
those we will be in contact with and that He will be glorified in all that we
say and do.
